According to Gartner, "Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. A vendor in the Leaders quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. Market Leaders will typically be able to execute strongly across multiple geographies with products that cover both distributed file systems and object storage offerings. They will also have consistent financial performance, broad platform support and flexible deployments models."

Earlier this year in Gartner's Critical Capabilities for Object Storage2 report, IBM received the highest scores for key use cases important to customers, including: Analytics, Archiving and Cloud Storage. Further extending the IBM Cloud Object Storage solution offering, IBM recently announced new public cloud services that complement it's scalable object storage on premises offering with unique hybrid cloud options across the expansive network of IBM Cloud data centers around the world.

"IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Cloud Object Storage have combined to offer clients a flexible, scalable solution that can be deployed on premises and also use public cloud services," said Ed Walsh, general manager of IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. "By automating the movement of object storage to the cloud within Spectrum Scale, IBM's Transparent Cloud Tiering extends traditional storage in cloud repositories with policy driven, simplicity, security, and control."

Nuance: Managing R&D Data on HPC Grid with IBM Spectrum Scale To support its research and development teams, voice and language solutions leader, Nuance Communications utilizes high performance computing (HPC) grids for the development of new applications - everything from speech recognition and imaging to mobile-enabled and healthcare functions. The team tasked with providing the infrastructure for its globally dispersed developers sought a solution to provide scale and anytime, anywhere accessibility, with regionalization and secure segmentation as necessary, to the data stored within its HPC grids.

"Spectrum Scale transparent cloud tiering not only gives us the ability to add cloud and object storage easily but also allows us to move data seamlessly between file, object, and cloud," said Bob Houvener, Sr. Dir Global IT Infrastructure and Advanced Computing, Nuance Communications, Inc. "We can move towards maintaining a unified view of all our data under a single security and management infrastructure."

Today, Nuance has become more efficient in its use of storage both vertically, to scale to growing capacity demands and horizontally to automatically manage different storage types, each with differing costs.